6 Crucial Steps to Stay Relevant with Your Digital Marketing in 2015

“Relevance is a search engine’s holy grail. People want results that are closely connected to their queries.”

This quote is from Marc Ostrofsky, an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and New York Times Best Selling Author. When it comes to online marketing, whether it be SEO, social media or paid advertising, being relevant is absolutely essential.
Online marketers want their Facebook posts to get hundreds if not thousands of comments, their tweets to get retweeted for the world to see and their search engine queries to catapult towards the top of Google.

Nobody wants to be standing in the corner at a New Year’s Eve party without having someone to kiss at midnight. The same can be said for digital marketers. They crave attention and in this competitive industry, having your content and website remaining relevant is a must if you want to succeed.

If you follow the 6 crucial steps to stay relevant in the digital marketing landscape in 2015, online marketers will be seeking your expertise on how you gained so much ground on the competition.

1. Promoted Facebook posts

The Wall Street Journal recent ran an article saying that brands are wasting money on Facebook and Twitter. They state that less than 0.1% of fans and followers actually interact with each post on average from a brand.

Facebook announced last week that another tweak to its news feed algorithm will soon make it even less likely brands’ unpaid posts will be actually be seen by users.

Don’t try and fight Facebook’s algorithm. Even though it is extremely frustrating for marketers who produce compelling content, if you can’t beat them, join them! If brands want to stay relevant, they will need to pay money to promote a post. Even boosting your post for $5 can make a big difference in regards to the overall interaction!

2. Social media brand advocates

If a consumer loves your brand, reach out to this person to see if they will help promote your company! A dental practice in Dayton encouraged its patients to make a post on their own Facebook page about their experience. The message that they were trying to convey was that the dental practice provided its customers with a caring experience.

This instantly generated referrals to the practice from friends of friends seeing these Facebook posts! Reaching out to brand advocates to see if they will help promote your brand is a no-brainer for 2015.

3. Google+ reviews

In a similar fashion to reaching out to brand advocates to promote content, the same digital marketing plan can be formulated to obtain positive reviews. Reviews are a source of truth that will live on the web indefinitely. It is amazing how many companies don’t even get reviews for their Google+ page, which is the first search result that will appear when people type in a branded search query.

Reach out to your customers to see if they will leave a review on your Google+ page.

An attorney in Tampa implemented a review strategy and within 3-months, they generated 17 Google reviews and have the most Google+ reviews in the Tampa area! If you focus on reviews in 2015, it will benefit your website and brand for many years to come.

4. Digital PR

There should be someone on your staff dedicating 5-10 hours per week on digital PR outreach in 2015. What exactly is Digital PR? It is reaching out to industry specific websites and making a pitch about your company with the hopes that these websites will do a write-up on your brand.

If these industry related websites end up linking back to your website, it will have huge SEO benefits. Additionally, the readership on industry related websites could help your business generate more leads! A pizza restaurant in Cincinnati constantly gets food blogs to write about the fresh new concept of creating your own pizza. This has resulted in great Digital PR in the perfect publications!

5. Mobile SEO

2015 is going to be a huge year for “Mobile SEO.” Google recently announced that they are experimenting with special ranking features for mobile-friendly sites. It is going to be critical for businesses to optimize their mobile site for SEO so they can rank well on this platform.

Making sure that your website is mobile friendly and optimized for SEO will have a huge impact on search results not only this year, but for many years down the road.

6. Digital marketing audit

Digital marketers tend to think that they are always right. Don’t be stubborn in 2015; if you are willing to listen to an outside source, it could open amazing opportunities.

We recently had a phone call with a digital marketing agency in San Diego. They are on the opposite side of the country so we are not in direct competition. We decided to conduct an audit on each of our websites and social media channels and then have a 1-hour follow-up phone call to discuss the findings.

It was absolutely amazing how much we were able to learn by having an outside expert interpret our various marketing channels. In 2015, have someone else conduct a deep dive into your digital marketing channels. This process will take 2-3 hours but you will gain invaluable insight!

Staying relevant on the digital frontier will require an open mind, digital outreach, brand advocates and some money behind your social media posts. Follow these steps and your brand will be extremely relevant in 2015.

Comments

Great tips. I especially agree with the first tip. If you can’t beat them, join them. On my clients pages that we run consistent ads, even as small as $50 a month, along with various promoted posts through-out the month. They do way better than pages that aren’t willing to have an ad budget. Unfortunately, the benefits of growing a page organically is shrinking. I’ve used my own page as a personal experience on organic growth. Bottom line, you’ve got to pay to play. I also like your tip about getting a digital marketing audit. I offer these on a regular basis to my clients and i’m having a holiday special. Thanks for the great articles and Happy Thanksgiving!

Interesting that Guy Kawasaki states that you should never use a Social Media Agency …

Jason Parks

Anthony,

If your company has the capability to handle social media and online marketing internally, it is a no-brainer that it should be kept in-house. That being said, there are so many businesses that just don’t have the resources or expertise to handle all of the various aspects of digital marketing.

Jason Parks

Carol,

I’m glad you enjoyed the article. I learned early on that you need to pay to play. I can remember the good old days from 2010-2012 when the organic reach on Facebook was phenomenal. Once Facebook wanted advertisers to pay to appear in the newsfeed, it was either abide by their guidelines or lose all of your traction on Facebook.

More relevance in a market full of relevant information or is this just another long list, that is just like all the other long lists of very obvious things that you have to do to stay relevant, from yet another social media guru … As we all stay relevant and all drown in our own marketing hype we will saturate the people we most want to target with so much relevance and targeted marketing that it will all be lost in a cacophony of relevant noise.

Just wanting to evoke a discussion on the fact that we are pretty much already saturated with all that relevance and why many internet brands eventually realise that the TV is the only mass medium arena where they will have constant attention (subliminal as well as actual) and have had to take up advertising on TV to grow market share. Relevance changes nothing if you are lost in the noise of everyones perfect relevance with little time to complete your own social marketing while being bombarded by others.

Jason Parks

That is a great stat Jeff! Not to mention that those 3 billion people will probably spend even more time on the internet and their smartphones than they do today.

Thanks for this.
Relevance is actually one of the most crucial thing marketer can obtain. Some are basic but yet not of these basic things are followed, thanks for mentioning these anyway. But the most important thing for me now is the mobile SEO. Mobile usage today is really vast that is why mobile must not be forgotten to any marketing tactics next year.

Jason Parks

Mobile SEO is HUGE! Especially determining whether or not conversion will come from a mobile site via contact form if you will be more likely to convert through a phone call. There is a lot of analysis that needs to be done from a mobile SEO perspective. Making sure your site is mobile friendly is obviously the first step.

Jake Pavadovoni

Great list! Social Media presence is becoming increasingly more important as business owners. On top of that, SEO is starting to rely heavily on social media – more than ever.
I use my facebook fanpage to drive rougly 80% percent of my traffic. (I didn’t plan it this way, it just kind of happened.) In my opinion, Facebook is the easiest way to engage your users, and in return – get more leads, sales, and customers. If you want to check out a free tool I use to drive TONS of traffic with facebook, go here: http://bit.ly/1ozbGt2

Amanda

Great article, Jason. A lot of valuable information in here. After a business has learned to stay relevent, it is also important for them to then improve their strategy, especially during this Holiday season. Feel free to fancy this blog written on some inbound marketing tips to ignite holiday campaigns: